The way I understand it, mostly from listening to Bob Dylan songs of a certain vintage (“Already confessed/Don’t need to confess again”), once you’ve been washed in the flavorful blood of the Lamb you’re guaranteed passage to Heaven barring a renunciation of it all. Doesn’t matter what you do or say so long as you cling to that ticket. There must be some junkies in the flock, and Heaven is as Heaven does, so is it mountains of China White for the addict of (and to) faith? Heaven is no dirty needles and no cut dope? or is the addiction cured on the trip up? What if you don’t want to be cured? or can you get cured and just enjoy the stuff as you get the urge, with no unpleasantness between indulgences? or is the whole experience a natural high surpassing the pale earthly imitation, which is to ask if the residents of Heaven are perpetually stoned.
Just asking.
Incoming economics adviser and treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner, respectively, should be required to drown Robert Rubin, the extremely wealthy and clueless-at-crunch-time Citibank chair and former Clinton treasury secretary under whose wing the pair flourished. This is to demonstrate that they’re not going to do for the country what their mentor did. And it would so demonstrate because while it’s not exactly illegal to repeatedly drown someone and then resuscitate them, it’s still illegal to go all the way; Summers and Geithner would have to resign upon killing Rubin, maybe, and might even become the first government officials in 200 years to go to jail over a matter of conscience, sort of.
Probably not, though.
Ken Silverstein at Harper’s notes that the windfall profits tax Obama proposed to levy against record oil company rakes has been disappeared from the transition team’s web site. My policy of ignoring the campaigns of both candidates in favor of whatever I could make up about them left me with no idea that the tax played a major role in Obama’s campaign but even if I had known, its consignment to the ash heap of campaign promises would have left me unmoved—the president-elect remains in my view the only president whose memoirs will almost certainly outshine his four-year tenure in office. He might be the smartest president since his public policy soulmate, the demented Richard Nixon, but he’s without question the best writer to hold down the job in a century or so.
The fascination that Rudyard Kipling holds for certain polemicists and functionaries among the neoconservative crowd has long been the object of mockery here at BTC News. Imagine my shock, then, at running across a late poem (1927; Kipling died in 1936), The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that manages to summarize our current economic difficulties in only four lines.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
You go, Rudyard. Too bad he wasn’t around to counsel Alan Greenspan and various members of the Obama economic team. Who could have guessed?
